The Vote-Buying President∗
Andrew Clarke†
University of Virginia
Kenneth Lowande‡
University of Virginia
September 22, 2015
Abstract
More than fifty years after Neustadt’s Presidential Power, studying the President’s influence on
lawmaking remains hindered by the difficulty of tracking hidden lobbying efforts. To overcome
this challenge, we leverage a comprehensive record of calls and conversations generated by
Richard Nixon’s infamous taping system. We use this record—which provides an account of
all meetings and calls between legislators and the President—to test alternative theories of
presidential vote-buying. In keeping with a cartel-based model of presidential vote-buying, we
find that the President disproportionately targets members of the majority party whose policy
goals render them most likely to defect from the cartel arrangement. In addition to evaluating
these extant theories, the results suggest conditions under which the presidents will successfully
promote their legislative agenda.
∗
The authors were equal contributors. We thank Matt Beckmann and Keith Krehbiel for comments. We also
thank Cary McStay and the Nixon Presidential Library for sharing the data, and the Presidential Recordings Project
at the Miller Center for Public Affairs.
†
PhD Candidate, Department of Politics. [email protected], http://www.andrewjclarke.net
‡
PhD Candidate, Department of Politics. [email protected], http://www.lowande.com
1
1
Introduction
The president’s capacity to shape policy among separate powers is a central concern for voters,
researchers, and politicians. In the decades following Neustadt’s (1960) seminal work, presidential power has often been described as a function of the president’s ability either to alter the
status quo “unilaterally” (Moe and Howell 1999; Howell 2003) or push their legislative agenda
through Congress (Cohen 1982; Sullivan 1991; Edwards 1991, 2000; Beckmann 2008, 2010; Cohen
2012). Though unilateral action is typically overt, observing presidential “arm-twisting,” backroomdealing, lobbying, and vote-buying remains a critical research challenge. In absence of direct observation, most studies are forced to infer presidential strategy from second-order outcomes.
We overcome this impasse by using an infamous—but under utilized—resource: the complete
record of conversations taped in secret by the Nixon Administration. The automated recordings
provide a comprehensive sample of the president’s interactions with members of Congress, which we
use to test patterns of White House lobbying. Competing theories of lawmaking in Congress point to
divergent predictions about the precise identity of critical voters.1 In pivotal theories of lawmaking,
presidents should attempt to “buy” those who might override their veto (Krehbiel 1998; Brady
and Volden 2006). On the other hand, presidents might buy majority party legislators hurt by the
party’s agenda control (Cox and McCubbins 2005; Jenkins and Monroe 2012a,b). By “vote-buying,”
we mean any activity designed to alter the preferences of a legislator—including persuasion, “armtwisting,” and promising “side-payments.”2 These vote-buying predictions proceed from alternative
theories and assumptions which, in turn, produce divergent expectations about the determinants
of presidents’ success in legislative affairs. Thus, without direct tests of these predictions, theories
of presidential influence might proceed from flawed micro-foundations.
Though we find some support for a pivotal politics model of vote-buying, we estimate that 93
percent of our data is more consistent with a Cartel-based model. This is particularly surprising,
1
Strictly speaking, the theories we consider are not theories of vote-buying. Generating vote-buying predictions
requires additional assumptions.
2
Thus, our definition is considerably more broad than Snyder’s (1991) model, which focuses on “bribes.” We set aside
distinctions between “lobbying,” “bargaining,” and “vote-buying,” as our analysis does not allow us to differentiate
between them.
2
since our data covers the complete 92nd Congress—historically, a well-known nadir in partisanship and party voting in Congress. Moreover, this reinforces an emerging understanding in the
study of Congress, that both models explain features of the lawmaking process—and that their
relative applicability is conditioned by historical context and the salience of legislation (Chiou and
Rothenberg 2003; Woon and Cook 2015).
2
Theories
Freshly inaugurated presidents must come to terms with informational shortcomings, a colossal
job description, and a finite amount of time to make good on campaign promises. Faced with
this political environment, presidents must conserve resources and work efficiently to secure their
legislative agenda. What are the specific tactics employed to improve or preserve a policy status
quo? The President may attempt to directly accomplish her policy goals by marginally shifting the
distribution of congressional preferences, but partisan and non-partisan models provide divergent
predictions as to which legislators should be subject to presidential vote-buying. In short, the
President can attempt to buy the votes of pivotal members of Congress (Brady and Volden 2006;
Krehbiel 1998) or enervate (or fortify) the procedural and organizational capacity of the majority
party in Congress (Cox and McCubbins 2005).
To identify targets of presidential vote-buying, we begin by appraising the legislative value of
individual legislators. Non-partisan theories of legislative politics make this question more tractable
by simplifying the immeasurable complexity of American politics. In Figure 1—a partial reproduction of Figure 2.7 from Krehbiel (1998, 34)—we provide the basics of the Pivotal Politics model of
policy making.3 Recall the model collapses special interests, parties, the media, and electoral politics into a simple, continuous, unidimensional distribution of congressional preferences; all members
of Congress possess single-peaked preferences along this policy space; and status quo policies are
exogenously given. With these simplifying assumptions, the most influential lawmakers become
clear. Specifically, these “pivotal” legislators are identified by the three-fifths vote necessary to in-
3
In a minor departure from Krehbiel (1998), we present the Gridlock Interval as a two-dimensional rectangle. We do
this to draw the reader’s attention to this area of interest, but strictly speaking, the interval is best represented as
a single line.
3
voke cloture in the Senate and the two-thirds vote needed to override a presidential veto in both the
House and Senate (Brady and Volden 2006; Krehbiel 1998). Let f be the filibuster pivot (defined
as the 41st most liberal lawmaker), and m represent the median member of the legislature. Finally,
let v be defined as the veto override pivot—the legislator at the
2
3
mark closest to p, a conservative
president.4
To illustrate the significance of the veto override pivot, consider the liberal median member’s
efforts to move policy from the veto override pivot, v, closer to m. The pivotal politics model
predicts that these efforts will ultimately fail. A conservative president, p, will veto the new policy
proposal (as it moves policy away from her ideal point), and v will vote against overriding the
presidential veto. Much to the chagrin of m, a conservative status quo will be preserved.
Figure 1 – Vote-Buying in Pivotal Politics
Gridlock Interval
f
m
v
p
Pivot Zone
xi
If we assume that presidents have the ability to buy votes, we gain clear predictions about
the target of presidential lobbying efforts. In the above example, a conservative president should
attempt to buy as many votes as she can around v. By persuading as many legislators near v to
move towards p, the President is able to expand the gridlock interval and protect a greater number
of conservative alternatives from liberal reform. While it is theoretically possible for presidents to
reduce the liberal boundary of the gridlock interval by shifting f to the right, we follow Krehbiel
(1998) in assuming presidential power prioritizes v over p: “Theoretically and empirically, the
putative persuaders channel their energies at or near the veto pivot v. Therefore, the method, too,
4
The location of p in Figure 1 basically reflects the location of Nixon in the 92nd Congress, which we later analyze.
Contrary to Nixon’s reputation as a moderate Republican, Common Space DW-NOMINATE Scores suggest that
President Nixon is considerably more conservative than the veto override pivot.
4
should be veto-pivot centered.” (Krehbiel 1998, 149).5 This leads to our first hypothesis:
Pivotal Politics Hypothesis: The President will contact legislators near the vetopivot override more frequently than other legislators, all else held constant.
Parties are intentionally absent in super-majoritarian theories of lawmaking (Brady and Volden
2006; Krehbiel 1998), but party-centered tactics are also available to presidents. If the “cartelization” of key positions of power is an accurate and crucial component of the data generating process,
how might our predictions of presidential vote-buying diverge from the pivotal politics model?6
In stark contrast to the pivotal politics model, cartel theory inserts negative agenda control
powers into a non-partisan, majoritarian model of legislative politics (Jenkins and Monroe 2012b).
By centralizing political power, partisans can effectively block policy alternatives from the floor
and significantly distort legislative outcomes towards the median member of the majority party.
Importantly, partisan power of this nature will manifest itself in the pre-emptive stacking of the
Rules Committee and the obstruction of policy alternatives that negatively impact a majority of
the majority party.
The procedural power of the cartel is perhaps most salient in the ‘block-out zone’ (Cox &
McCubbins 2005). To illustrate this concept, we present Jenkins and Monroe’s (2012, 902) model
of majority party utility in Figure 2. Let M represent the majority-party median, F be defined as
the floor median, and 2M-F represent the reflection point of the floor median through the majority
party median. The block-out zone represents all status quos between the floor median, F and the
reflection point of F through M, 2M-F. Any open-rule vote on any status quo policy in the blockout zone will invariably result in policy at F, which negatively impacts a majority of the majority
party. By effectively wielding “negative agenda control,” congressional parties are able to prevent
bills in this region from ever reaching a floor vote.
But as Jenkins and Monroe (2012b) demonstrate, members of the majority cartel do not equally
5
See also Theriault, Hickey, and Blass (2011), who write that pivotal politics “gives us leverage on which members
are most likely to be targets of presidential persuasion and how their participation will affect the bill’s outcome [...]
systematic evidence of the mechanics of presidential persuasion is difficult to come by, there is no doubt these tactics
do take place behind closed doors”(581).
6
We leave more explicit analysis of presidential vote-buying under CPG and other partisan-centered theories (e.g.,
Party Unity models) to future research.
5
benefit from this arrangement. In fact, centrist lawmakers incur disproportionate policy costs, and
majority party leaders must generously compensate these co-partisans to ensure the survival of the
cartel. By assuming a uniform distribution of policy preferences across a unidimensional policy
spaces, Jenkins and Monroe (2012b) estimate that majority-party members within the first 30%
of the block-out zone suffer net policy losses. Figure 2 depicts the block-out zone and all majority
party members that suffer from cartel membership (i.e., the 30% zone and majority party members
on the minority side of F ).
Figure 2 – Vote-Buying in Cartel Theory
Ui
Cartel Blockout Region
0
2M − F
M
F
P
30% Zone
xi
We extend the logic of this argument by conceptualizing the president as the “vote-buyer-inchief.” The presence of a dissatisfied bloc of voters within the majority party cartel provides a
tactical opportunity for presidential vote-buying. If the President is among the majority party,
her best response is to reinforce congressional leadership by assisting M in the disbursement of
necessary side-payments. If the President cares about her party’s legislative agenda, she has a
strong incentive to sustain the cartel in any way she can, and assisting co-partisans that incur net
policy losses is a logical place to start.
If, on the other hand, the executive branch is controlled by a minority president, we expect she
will expend resources to break the cartel. Consider the location of a conservative President, P, and
a liberal cartel, as is the case in Figure 2. At a minimum, P may be able to make majority-party
side payments more costly to the opposition party. Better still, the President may drive a wedge
into the 30% Zone of the cartel and successfully prohibit the full exercise of party power. This
intuition provides our third, and final, hypothesis:
Cartel Hypothesis: The President will contact majority-party legislators that suffer
from the cartel arrangement more frequently than other lawmakers, all else held constant.
6
These two theories provide divergent expectations about who should be subject to presidential
vote-buying efforts. In the following section, we take these hypotheses to the data.
3
Data
Our data set is the universe of conversations involving the President which occurred in the Oval
Office, Executive Office Building, and over the White House Telephone from February 1971 through
July 1973.7 Unlike the systems used by other administrations, the automatic recording technology
employed by the Nixon Administration means that the creation of a record is entirely unrelated
to the president’s preferences.8 That is, though every president since Franklin Roosevelt utilized
some recording technology, Nixon’s system is the only which was comprehensive. All audio was
automatically recorded in secret. Thus, our data are free of selection effects which would otherwise
plague an endogenous sample of conversations. Once members of Congress are identified, this
provides a remarkably accurate accounting of presidential-legislative interaction during the period.
This represents a unique opportunity to evaluate existing theory. Most studies of presidential
influence in the legislative arena regress macro-political characteristics on outcomes—whether they
be variants of the CQ boxscore (Cohen 1982), a ratio of accomplishments over aspirations (Edwards
1985), or roll call votes (Covington 1987; Covington, Wrighton, and Kinney 1995). These covariates
are held together by an intermediary process which is difficult to observe. Put simply, studying
presidential influence in Congress is difficult because scholars rarely observe presidential behavior.9
In fact, when bargaining, vote-buying, lobbying, and “arm-twisting” impacts legislative outcomes,
it is often designed to remain hidden. The Nixon tapes circumvent this issue. Additionally, they
provide coverage over a complete Congress. This allows us to observe the strategies which should
occur in expectation over repeated lawmaking “games.” In short, for the purpose of testing theories
of presidential lobbying, it is a nearly ideal data set.
7
The Nixon Presidential Library and Museum maintains a database of all conversations in the tapes—the source file
for our data.
8
For an extensive discussion of presidential recordings as data, see Sullivan et al. (1999).
9
A key exception in this regard is Beckman (2008, 2010), who surveyed congressional aides, given their first-hand
knowledge of White-House lobbying efforts.
7
Nonetheless, using these records presents a few research challenges. Initially, we might be concerned that the recording devices only documented the President’s activity. The lion’s share of
activity in President’s legislative operation occurs outside the White House and the EOB. This
poses an inferential problem if there are heterogenous effects among presidential contacts and those
made by the president’s agents. Fortunately, we have little reason to believe that a radically different data generating process governs the distribution of lobbying for the President. These data,
we argue, represent a hyper-salient sample of the broader population of interbranch communications. The contacts we analyze require the White House to expend a very scarce resource (i.e., the
President’s time). These conversations, sometimes accompanied by a photo with the White House
photographer, send a strong, costly, and credible signal to targets of White House’s lobbying efforts:
their support matters, personally, to the President of the United States, and his administration is
keenly aware of their actions.
We were also concerned that we might induce measurement error in our dependent variable by
including all of the President’s conversations. Theoretically, presidential influence is a function of
lobbying key legislators—coordinating with leaders and “buying” key votes. If our data set contains
many conversations which have no plausible connection with the president’s agenda in Congress,
then it may not provide an appropriate test. To evaluate this concern, we listened to the tapes
themselves and found that, by-and-large, they hew to our conceptual understanding of presidential
lobbying. Many provide preliminary support for our vote-buying hypotheses. For instance, in
several conversations, President Nixon thanks Wilbur Mills for his work on H.R. 1 (the Social
Security Act Amendments of 1972)—later discussing the Amendments’ chances in the Senate.
President: I just wanted to tell you that I– how pleased I was that the committee got
H.R. 1 out today and I know you had a– you’ve really been slaving over the thing. [...]
I wanted you to personally know how much I appreciate it.10
But the data also contain conversations which—at first glance—do not appear to reflect legislative
10
Following Moravcsik’s (2010) recommendations, we include active links to all recorded conversations; May 12,
1971, Conversation 003-033, url: http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/rmn-003-033. Towards
the end of the conversation, Nixon celebrates after learning H.R. 1 will be considered under a closed rule.
Nixon would later follow-up after H.R. 1 cleared the House on June 23, 1971, url: http://millercenter.org/
presidentialrecordings/rmn-005-156. For an analysis of this particular case, see Chapter 10 of Zelizer (1998).
8
politics. In these calls and meetings, the president wishes legislators “happy birthday,” offers
condolences, and poses for photographs in front of the press.11 Again, our chief concern is that
these conversations will introduce measurement error—since they might be entirely independent
of the strategic process we seek to test. To alleviate this concern, we consulted archival finding
aids, transcripts and listened to a number of these “birthday” calls. The vast majority of these
conversations eventually turn to lawmaking. For example, the President made one such call to Rep.
Don Brotzman (R-CO):
President: [Clark] MacGregor was just telling me you better celebrate because when
you’re fifty that’s a hell of an old age...
President Nixon and Brotzman discuss golf.
Brotzman: See, we’re over here working this morning on your revenue-sharing program–
President: Oh, great.
Brotzman: —which I’m strongly in favor of and—
President: Well, I appreciate it.12
The President made a similar call “across the aisle” to Sen. Russell Long (D-LA):
President: Russell, I’m not calling you for a thing, I just noted– one of my spies–
you’re having a birthday. So I wanted you to know you can’t have a birthday without
having your friend at the White House calling you up...
President Nixon orders Long to “take the night off.”
Long: Well don’t order me to do anything for about another half hour because I’m still
trying to move this bill along.
President: Oh, you’re in there? Stay there, stay there!
They laugh.13
These calls and meetings begin with some initial pretext, but inevitably deviate to discussion of
legislation or, more generally, support for the president. Moreover, in conversations which do
not mention legislation explicitly, the President generally begins by indicating his legislative aide
informed him it was the legislator’s birthday. In the examples above, Nixon references MacGregor
(Counsel to the President on congressional relations) and his “spies.”
The key question, then, is whether these conversations represent “lobbying”—the President
attempting to influence the preferences of legislators. Though these conversations do not reinforce
11
As an additional check, we analyzed the finding aid of every conversation to be sure that no conversation recorded
a bill signing ceremony.
12
June 28, 1971, Conversation 005-165, url: http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/rmn-005-165.
13
November 3, 1971, Conversation 013-108, url: http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/rmn-013-108.
9
the popular perception of presidential “arm-twisting,” we believe they satisfy the basic criterion for
inclusion. All members of Congress have birthdays—yet, as Figure 3 shows, the President chose a
(non-random) subset to call. Our sample represents the set of people who the President devoted
time and attention to—those who he deemed were worth calling personally. They provide a simple
signal: the President cares. Whether the calls themselves are most appropriately categorized as
“vote-buying,” “lobbying,” or the expenditure of “political capital”—they all reflect the President’s
strategic calculus.
Figure 3 – Presidential Contact in the 92nd Congress
Finally, we are sensitive to the concern that restriction to President Nixon and the 92nd Congress
may influence the generalizability of our findings. Ideally, we would expand this analysis to the
inclusion of automated recordings of all post-Nixon Presidents. The Watergate Scandal, however,
made these recordings a political liability.14 In light of this limitation, there are two ways in
14
Note, none of the conversations used in the analysis mention Watergate. The scandal does not appear to influence
the President’s interactions with members until the 93rd Congress.
10
which our findings could fail to generalize to other presidential administrations. One might argue
President Nixon is merely an outlier; he is, after all, regarded as exceptionally machiavellian in
the pursuit of his political ambitions.15 While this comports with a popular press understanding
of Nixon, it is at odds with the vast majority of presidency scholarship in the last 25 years. As
Beckmann and Kumar (2011) note, the idiosyncrasies of those who occupy the office (whether true
or untrue) should not significantly influence the strategies employed to influence Congress.
A second possibility is that the unique historical and political context of the Nixon years may
limit the generalizability of our findings. We take this critique seriously, as a large body of research
is predicated on the relationship between macro-political variables (e.g. divided government, majority party strength, etc.) and outcomes. For our purposes, we must consider the possibility that
competing theories of vote-buying may be contingent on the political environment surrounding the
President. As Figure 4 shows, the 92nd Congress (and the 1960s and 1970s, more generally) represents a well-known nadir of partisan sorting—largely due to the presence of Southern Democrats.16
The time series also predates expansion of the Speakers’ role in making committee assignments.17
Moreover, as Cox and McCubbins (2005, 94) show, the majority and minority party roll rates for
the 92nd Congress are roughly identical (0.026 and 0.046, respectively).
While these empirical facts imply the 92nd Congress presented a rare opportunity to maximize
Presidential success, we have little reason to believe that this will significantly alter Presidential
strategy. The formal models we draw upon provide straightforward expectations about who the
President will attempt to lobby. Though the size of the gridlock interval and majority party blockout zone change, strategic fundamentals should remain relatively constant. Thus, it would be
inappropriate to draw inferences about the relative efficacy of presidential strategy from our data,
but we do have an opportunity to empirically evaluate deductive theories of legislative politics from
15
Additionally, he might be seen as a particularly effective president in legislative affairs. Indeed, Krehbeil (1998)
rates him 2nd in veto-pivot power, only behind Eisenhower.
16
Here we use second-dimension Common Space DW-NOMINATE scores to spread out the distribution of observations. Our empirical analysis, however, focuses on the first dimension of these scores. We are sensitive to potential
ideal point bias—that is not limited to the 2nd dimension, but which, Krehbiel and Peskowitz (2014) have shown
to be particularly problematic.
17
For a discussion of this reform, see Chapter 5 of Schickler (2001).
11
a presidential perspective.
Figure 4 – Presidential Contact in the 92nd Congress
4
Design
To test the implications in Section 2, we analyze the cross-section of legislators in the 92nd Congress.
We model presidential contact as a function of revealed preferences and the legislator’s institutional
position in Congress. Formally, our general model of presidential lobbying is
y ∗ = β0 + β1 V oteBuyingi + γX i
(1)
where y ∗ is the linear model within a count GLM18 and X i represents a vector of control variables.
The quantity of interest, β1 , provides an estimate of the President’s relative propensity to engage
in vote-buying with key legislations.
18
We present poisson and negative binomial regressions, however, the results for each are quite similar. A summary
of our efforts to determine whether the results presented are “knife-edged” estimates appears in the Appendix.
12
Competing theories of presidential vote-buying provide an additional methodological task. More
specifically, the Cartel and Pivotal Hypotheses proceed from alternative micro-foundations, such
that it is difficult to recover the precise situation in which the models will produce divergent predictions. Both may operate simultaneously—or not at all. Moreover, the “garbage-can” approach
of including both measures of the same explanatory variable may not provide an adequate test of
which theory is truly operative (Achen 2005). Following the recommendations of Imai and Tingely
(2012), we use a finite mixture model to evaluate the relative applicability of each theory to the
members of Congress in the dataset.19 In this case, the two components of the mixture are variants of Equation 1—the first testing the explanatory power of the veto-pivot strategy, the second
incorporates spatial predictors of net policy losses within the majority party cartel.
An additional advantage of this specification is that for each observation—in this case, a member of Congress—we estimate the probability that it is consistent with each component. These
posterior probabilities allow us to provide a useful summary of the data—the proportion of members of Congress consistent with each respective theory. We should note that we have no prior
expectations as to which theory ought to be more operative. Pivotal politics and the Cartel Model
remain prominent because they have demonstrated the ability to explain some proportion of legislative activity. However, estimating the relative explanatory power of these theories has direct
implications for future research on the determinants of presidential success in the legislative arena.
That is, identifying the dominant variety of vote-buying behavior will refine expectations about
which political circumstances should condition presidential leadership in lawmaking.
4.1
Variables
Our dependent variable is the total number of contacts between the President and the member of
Congress.20 A “contact” is the appearance of the legislator in a conversation with the President,
19
For other recent examples of FMM in political science, see Weidmann (2011) and Heinrich (2013).
20
As a robustness check, we used an alternative dependent variable—a simple indicator coded “1” of the legislator
appears in the conversation list. Though this results in the omission of several variables due to collinearity, the
principal results for the vote-buying hypotheses remain the same.
13
which could have occurred over the phone or face-to-face.21 Some conversations include multiple
legislators—generating a contact for each. In the 92nd Congress, President Nixon contacted 160
members of Congress for a total of 509 contacts.22 The mere fact that less than a third of all MCs
had any contact with the President reinforces our argument in Section 3. All members of Congress
are not equally important in determining legislative outcomes. The President’s attention should
be targeted to those that matter.
To test the Pivotal Hypothesis, we include the absolute Common Space DW-NOMINATE distance between the legislator and the veto-override pivot in their respective chamber Carroll et al.
(2015).23 This continuous variable has a number of advantages. Since the pivotal politics model
only indicates the President’s strategy should be “veto-pivot centered,” it is not clear what interval
around the pivot should be targeted. Indeed, specifying any interval implies that the President—
though acting consistent with the theory—targets legislators with some error. Researchers are
capable of estimating the precise pivot after the fact—but this may have been more difficult for
the President. However, we are uncomfortable including a simple dummy variable for an arbitrary
number of legislators around the pivots—both because this has no direct theoretical basis, and
because we have found the results to be highly sensitive to changes in the interval. Arbitrarily
hanging the interval results in the coefficient moving in and out of statistical significance (though it
is most often in the predicted direction). Thus, the results in the following section include the VOP
Distance measure—with the expectation that as one moves away from the veto-override pivot, the
President should be less likely to contact them.
To test the Cartel Hypothesis, we follow Jenkins and Monroe (2012a) by including an indicator
variable for majority party members that are predicted to suffer a net loss in policy utility. This
variable includes both majority party members on the minority side of the floor median, as well
as those in the initial 30% of the majority block-out zone.24 Because the majority party median
21
A non-trivial number of contacts were recorded both by telephone and oval office recorders. Accordingly, we
systematically excluded these duplicates.
22
Note, these contacts are rare in the context of the complete record of the Nixon tapes, which include over 22,000
conversations and 56,000 contacts.
23
According to Common Space scores, these are Sen. Charles Percy (R-IL) and Rep. Orval Hansen (R-ID).
24
Jenkins and Monroe (2012a) refer to this particular region as the “30 % Zone,” but they also refer to a “net policy
14
in both chambers takes a negative value, all Democrats whose score is greater than the product
of 0.6 and the party median (−0.34 in the House and −0.32 in the Senate) are coded “1.” For
the 92nd Congress, this interval includes conservative southern Democrats who certainly fit the
mold of those who could be “bought.” Moreover, Figure 3 provides preliminary support for this
targeting—given that the moderate tail of Democratic party contact is considerably denser than
the ideological distribution. In expectation, members within this region should be significantly
more likely to be contacted.
Critically, we also account for planning sessions held with congressional leaders. As Beckmann
(2010) has convincingly shown, presidents engage in coordination and bargaining with party leaders.
Moreover, leaders may be selected on the basis of their proximity to the party median or their
expertise in a given policy area. Failure to account for the privileged status of chamber and
party leaders would prevent proper evaluation of both hypotheses. We also include indicators
for majority and minority party leadership positions in each chamber. These control variables
included party leaders, whips, Speaker of the House, Senate President Pro Tem, and the chairmen
of standing committees.25 Finally, we include dummy variables for legislator chamber, and whether
the legislator and President share partisan identification. Pooling chambers requires us to account
for membership, given that a single vote in the Senate brings the President closer to a winning
coalition. Controlling for political party allows us to compare Democrats in the “net policy loss
region” to other Democrats—rather than all other legislators.
5
Results
The results from the Pivotal Politics and Cartel Vote-Buying hypotheses appear in Table 1. We find
that both hypotheses are borne out in columns (a) and (b), and the appropriate joint estimation of
these theoretical predictions, presented in columns (d) and (e), returns strong, significant estimates
in the expected direction. We consider the result of each hypothesis individually before considering
loss zone,” which more accurately describes this variable.
25
In the results presented, we collapse these into dummy variables for majority/minority leadership and committee
positions by chamber—but combining or separating them does not influence the substantive interpretation of the
returned estimates.
15
which of the two vote-centered tactics predicts more of the variation in our data.
Table 1 – Models of Presidential Lobbying
Variable
VOP Distance
Pivotal
Politics
(a)
Senate Minority Leadership
House Majority Leadership
House Minority Leadership
House Chair
Senate Chair
President’s Party
Senate
Intercept
Garbage
Can
(c)
1.23**
(0.29)
2.95**
(0.78)
2.40**
(0.90)
4.03**
(0.78)
4.04**
(0.88)
2.44**
(0.38)
1.21**
(0.29)
1.95**
(0.21)
1.34**
(0.21)
-2.42**
(0.22)
0.26
(0.669)
1.31**
(0.36)
2.96**
(0.78)
2.42**
(0.90)
4.02**
(0.78)
4.05**
(0.88)
2.44**
(0.38)
1.24**
(0.437)
2.05**
(0.34)
1.34**
(0.21)
-2.56**
(0.41)
-1.20*
(0.55)
Policy Loss Interval
Senate Majority Leadership
Cartel
Model
(b)
2.63**
(0.80)
2.36**
(0.92)
3.72**
(0.80)
3.98**
(0.91)
2.28**
(0.37)
1.27**
(0.44)
1.21**
(0.34)
1.32**
(0.21)
-1.45**
(0.28)
Mixture
Pivotal
Cartel
Politics
Model
(d)
(e)
-1.63*
(0.68)
0.22
0.51)
1.01**
(0.30)
-14.27
(1264.63)
1.92**
(0.35)
1.98**
(0.47)
-3.30**
(1.03)
0.64**
(0.24)
1.23**
(0.27)
0.77*
0.34)
1.19**
(0.31)
4.89**
0.46)
2.32**
(0.32)
5.65**
(0.47)
4.81**
(0.21)
2.76**
(0.52)
2.80**
(0.41)
2.72**
(0.37)
1.51**
(0.19)
-3.63**
(0.39)
N
538
538
538
538
Standard errors in parentheses; negative binomial (a-c) and poisson (d-e) coefficients,
DV: Number of Presidential Contacts; ** p<0.01, * p<0.05
Following Brady and Volden (2006) and Krehbiel (1998), we expected presidents to target
members close to the veto override pivot as a means of preserving conservative status quos. This
“pivotal voter” tactic is supported by our results.26 As Figure 5 shows, the predicted number of
presidential contacts is decreasing in distance from the veto-override pivot. Members more likely to
26
As a robustness check, we also create a strictly ordinal measure of distance from the veto override pivot. The
results are nearly identical. Note, however, that these results appear to be sensitive to model specification (see the
Appendix for details). When possible, we utilize a negative binomial regression model to account for overdispersion
in our data.
16
be perceived as pivotal in the eyes of the President are expected to receive at least one phone call
or invitation to the oval office, while their more distant counterparts are not. While it is difficult
to precisely estimate pivotal members of Congress after accounting for measurement error, this
continuous, absolute measure of pivotal proximity supports the Pivotal Hypothesis.
Figure 5 – Lobbying the Pivots
Our second hypothesis follows from partisan theories of negative agenda control. Following
Jenkins and Monroe (2012b), we expected the President to target members of Congress that suffer
under the majority party cartel arrangement. More specifically, we expected a minority, Republican
president to buy the votes of Democrats that incur losses in net policy utility, despite their vital
role in maintaining the cartel. Our results strongly support this Cartel Vote-Buying hypothesis.
Democrats expected to receive a net loss in policy utility receive 1.29 additional calls or meetings
with the President. This marginal effect is statistically significant and in the expected direction.
These results suggest that while the majority party may work to ply centrists with extrapolicy
compensation, a minority President may work to counteract these efforts and subsequently weaken
17
the cartel agreement.
In column (c), we find that the Veto Override Pivot Distance variable is is neither significant nor
in the expected direction. This is unsurprising, given the model is an inappropriate “garbage can”
regression. The finite mixture model jointly estimates the effect of these rival (non-partisan and
partisan) vote-buying theories.27 The results, in columns (d) and (e), suggest that both the pivotal
politics and cartel theory explain significant proportions of our observations. The coefficients for
both variables, once jointly estimated, are in the appropriate direction, achieve traditional levels
of statistical significance, and generally reflect the magnitude of the effects provided in columns
(a) and (b). Interestingly, the partisan model contains the lion’s share of predictive power in the
data. When estimate the posterior probabilities that each legislators contacts are the result of each
theory, we find that approximately 0.93 of the variation in our dataset can be explained by the
Cartel Vote-Buying hypothesis.
Though these results provide general support for our hypotheses, we should note that contacts
of legislators who “can be bought” appear to account for less of the total conversational behavior
of the president than several of our control variables.28 As a matter of record, the president tended
to have more contact with party leaders than rank-and-file members who could be bought. Our
models are designed to account for sources of friction in the real world, which are not present in the
model. Coordination with party leaders falls into this category. In sum, though our results suggest
that the President looks to buy the votes of legislators when their location in the distribution of
congressional preferences is particularly important, this does not mean that the President’s primary
function is as a “vote-buyer” or that it accounts for the sum total of his meeting behavior.
6
Conclusion
The President’s ability to advance a legislative agenda is a critical feature of American politics.
To serve as party leaders and fulfill promises made to a national constituency, presidents must
influence congressional politics in exceedingly indirect and unobserved ways. Understanding this
27
Note that this approach is best suited in searching for predictive rather than causal inference. See Imai and Tingley
(2012) for more on this distinction.
28
We present marginal effect estimates of these variables in Figure 6 in the Appendix.
18
phenomenon is arguably more important now than at any time in American political history, as yet
another session of Congress described as “polarized,” “gridlocked,” and “obstructionist” draws to
a close. However, emphasis on macro-political factors such as polarization or divided government
downplays the agency of the President—who plays an active role in coordinating with leaders and
securing critical votes. Without understanding the strategies presidents employ, we cannot assess
their effectiveness as leaders. In short, studying the legislative strategies of presidents brings us
closer to answering a key question often asked by political scientists, historians, and journalists:
What more could have been done?
We advanced this line of inquiry in two ways. First, we repurposed the comprehensive archival
record of presidential conversations during the Nixon Administration—which provide a unique
opportunity to observe presidential lobbying. By providing complete coverage of the 92nd Congress,
our data is the largest systematic record of personal contacts from the president to members of
Congress. With firm evidence of direct presidential contact, we empirically evaluate leading formal
theories of legislative politics from the perspective of the president.
Second, we find that both non-partisan and partisan theories of lawmaking receive support, but
majoritarian, partisan models of congressional vote-buying fare remarkably well. This is particularly surprising, as our time-series marks the nadir of modern party power. The President appears
to be paying close attention to party politics at a time when the distinction between the two major
political parties is blurred by considerable overlap in the distribution of congressional preferences.
This raises an additional—and perhaps, troubling—possibility. Our results suggest that party
sorting and ideological polarization shrink the set of legislators who may be effectively lobbied by
the President. At the same time, majority parties have continued to centralize political authority
since the mid-20th century. Taken together, these developments make traditional approaches to
presidential lawmaking obsolete—only to encourage sweeping, “unilateral” means of accomplishing
the many policy goals of an ambitious president.
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Appendix
In the main text of the paper, we present the analyses we believe to be most appropriate. However,
there are numerous alternative specifications that produce estimates of the DGP of interest. Table
2 presents a set of these other models, which we describe in this appendix. Model (a) replicates
the analyses in Table 1 while assuming the dependent variable is poisson-distributed. Model (b)
re-estimates the coefficients with a log-transformed dependent variable to correct for the skew in
the number of contacts. Model (c) uses an indicator variable for whether a legislator was contacted
as the DV. Finally, Model (d) uses an alternative specification of the veto-override pivot, in which
all legislators within a .5 standard deviation of the veto override pivot (in DWNOM distance) are
coded “1” . The key result from this meta-analysis is that the veto-override pivot tends to be less
precisely estimated in these models.
As we note in Section 5, the leadership and committee chair control variables tend to wield
have predictive power on the frequency of presidential contacts. We plot the marginal effect of each
22
indicator variable on the predicted number of contacts in Figure 6.
Table 2 – Alternative Model Specifications and Explanatory Variables
Specification
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Description
Poisson Regression
Poisson Regression
Poisson Regression
Veto Pivot
Policy Loss Interval
Leadership
Chairs
–
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
+
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
–
Logged DV
Logged DV
Logged DV
–
Contacted Logit
Contacted Logit
Contacted Logit
–
√
–
+
Veto-Pivot Indicator
Veto-Pivot Indicator
Veto-Pivot Indicator
–
–
√
√
–
√
“ ” indicates coefficient is in the expected direction and significant (p < 0.05), “+” if coefficient is
significant (p < 0.1), “–” otherwise.
23
Figure 6 – Leadership Controls
24